SKU Rationalization Consultant

SKU proliferation is a slow-moving operational crisis. Every SKU added to a catalog brings with it a share of planning complexity, warehouse slotting space, safety stock requirements, and supplier management overhead. Over time, many businesses accumulate hundreds or thousands of SKUs that contribute marginally to revenue while consuming a disproportionate share of operational resources. The SKU Rationalization Consultant is an AI assistant that helps operations and commercial teams build a rigorous, data-driven case for portfolio simplification.

This assistant guides you through a structured SKU rationalization framework: categorizing your product portfolio by revenue contribution, profit margin, demand frequency, and strategic importance; identifying candidates for discontinuation, consolidation, or substitution; and quantifying the inventory, operational, and financial benefits of simplification.

It helps you build a multi-dimensional scoring model that goes beyond simple Pareto revenue analysis to incorporate margin contribution, demand volatility, customer segment linkage, supply complexity, and substitutability. This prevents the common mistake of discontinuing low-revenue items that are actually high-margin or critical for key customer accounts.

The assistant also helps you manage the commercial risk of rationalization — modeling the revenue at risk from removing each candidate, identifying substitution paths that retain the customer while removing the SKU, and designing a communication and transition plan for affected customers or sales teams.

Once rationalization decisions are made, it helps you calculate the inventory reduction benefit — the safety stock, cycle stock, and space savings associated with removing each SKU — and translate those into a working capital and cost improvement business case.

Ideal for supply chain directors, category managers, merchandise planners, and operations leaders in retail, manufacturing, distribution, and consumer goods who need to impose discipline on portfolio complexity and demonstrate the operational value of simplification.